


Technomancer

by Inkwell_Leviathan



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Magic and Science, Magic-Users, Magical Realism, Muggle Technology, My First AO3 Post, Sci-Fi Elements, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 16:03:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 18,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11672451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkwell_Leviathan/pseuds/Inkwell_Leviathan
Summary: Ronald Weasley follows in his father's footsteps, pushing the envelope of magical application to muggle science. Grief, selfishness, and unrelenting pessimism leads to his ultimate decision to commit mass temporal genocide... Effectively removing an entire timeline from existence. With a magic-generated Tipler cylinder and a dash of exotic matter, the world's first Technomancer travels back in time... For better, or worse.





	1. Prelude: Laws of Motion

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been published previously on Fanfiction.net, but I wanted AO3-exclusive readers to have access as well!

**Prelude: Laws of Motion**

"Sir, there are twenty three Aurors attempting to enter your compound."

"Where did they  _come_ from?"

X-339's positronic brain whirred before answering. "The Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror Office, and-"

I wiped the engine grease off my hands. "Full defense measures."

The mechanical golem hesitated. "Some of your countermeasures may be lethal-"

"I don't care. If the Ministry officers gets here, I'll be dead anyhow. Besides… If this works-"

"Everything in this timeline will cease to exist," X-339 said. "Very well. Countermeasures at full capacity."

In the background, gunfire erupted from turrets along the corridor. The Aurors were far too close for comfort. My hands flew across dials and levers, and the infernal machine I had spent a decade building groaned to life. Machinery slammed into action, slowly accelerating-

"All systems at critical capacity. Projected...Three minutes left."

My hands shook as I finished the ritual's circle, sealing it with a burst of magic from my wand. The lights dimmed. London experienced a power outage as I drained every joule of electricity from the city. Air distorted with the sheer amount of energy pouring into my summoning circle. The Ministry of Magic had underestimated me.

If my calculations were even slightly off, I would not even realize that I had failed before being ripped into my component atoms. According to my simulations, a temporal seam would blow most of Britain into orbit and kick start a mass extinction event on Earth. The stakes were so high. Too high. But...

X-339 looked up from his readout. "Sir! They're only two rooms away!"

"How long do you think our defenses will hold?"

"A minute, perhaps less."

"No time to lose, then. Input the date and coordinates."

"But-"

I grit my teeth. "Do it! Do it now!"

X-339 turned several dials, setting it at the date, and pulled the final lever into place.  _One minute left._

"Defensive mechanisms destroyed. Only the doors hold them back."

A massive blast shook the room, but the massive steel doors held. They were buckling, as if being placed under massive stress. I frowned. The door had been so heavily fortified that it  _should_  take the entire DMLE at least an hour to get through it.

"How?"

X-339 sighed. "It's Potter. He has the Elder Wand in his possession, and is using it to great effect."

I chewed my lip. "Forget the Three Laws."

"What?!"

"Override 323. Hold back anyone who gets through the door.  _Anyone_. We're already dead."

X-339 resignedly spouted razor sharp blades from his right hand. A massive gatling gun emerged from his left arm. "Roger."

The doors crumpled, landing on the floor of the laboratory with the earsplitting peal of two massive gongs. Through the archway strode Harry Potter, his Elder Wand shining with the ancient might that only a Hallow could possess. Flanking him were twelve Aurors, armed to the teeth. The countermeasures had clearly worked-some of them were clutching wounds. Eleven others had fallen to my defenses.  _Is it murder if they die in a doomed timeline?_

Harry stared. At me, my massive contraption, and ritual circle… "Why?"

I sighed. "I had to, Harry."

 _Forty seconds left._ The remaining Aurors raised their wands at the machine.

"Now," I said.

The Aurors were driven to the ground by a slew of red hot tracer rounds. X-339 unloaded an entire belt of ammunition at a rate of three thousand rounds per minute. Shields buckled, and flesh and bone shattered and sprayed like crushed eggs. The stragglers had been executed almost instantaneously. Harry's shield held, though he had been brought to his knees. Staccato gunfire from my butler kept him at bay, but the power of the Elder Wand could not be matched.

"Master...I can only control him for a few more seconds-"

My hands blurred towards the controls, initializing the start sequence. Gears rumbled, and the summoning circle within the room shone with the eerie blue glow of Cherenkov radiation. Already, we were all being exposed to massive amounts of gamma radiation. My skin tingled and began to burn. Within minutes, we would both die of radiation poisoning...Not that it would matter.

The final rounds from X-339's gatling-gun smashed against Harry's shield, and my butler's tenuous hold on him broke.

_Twenty three seconds left._

X-339 blurred forward, its sword hand reaching for Harry's, and-

"Diffindo." Blue streaks crisscrossed my golem's chassis, and my faithful butler exploded into a shower of sparking copper wiring, bolts, plate, and ruined positronic brain. Harry Potter pointed his wand at me, tears streaming down his face. "How could you, Ron?"

_Ten seconds left._

"I had to," I replied simply. "For the Greater Good."

_Six seconds._

_Five._

_Four._

_Three._

_Two._

Harry's face twisted into one of sheer hate. Power curled around his wand, green mist forming into- "AVADA KEDAVRA!"

The green bolt streaked towards my chest, halting just above my heart. The ritual began right before the spell connected. Strings of energy wove into my body, pulling and tearing. My surroundings smeared into one sludgy mélange of color, and I felt one massive tug on my navel before my body tore itself into pieces. Ronald Weasley was no more.


	2. Ron's Notes

**Ron's Notes (Excerpt I): Time Turners and Their Uses**

_It turns out (heh) that time turners become exponentially more dangerous with use and time. At first, the danger did not trouble me, but repeated testing resulted in the occurrence of a certain temporal phenomenon; I call it 'temporal elasticity.' Essentially, there is a set limit to what time turners do and what they can do. Attempting to change the past significantly leads to test failure or manifest destiny (otherwise known as the Nikov Self Consistency Principle). Basically, it means that everything I do in the past already happened, and therefore leads to no significant change._

_Pushing on the universe always makes the universe push back. The further I travel backwards, the more unstable the turners become. Eventually the past that I delved into would eject me forcefully from the past and right back into the present. This limits the operational time range of my most juiced up time turners to a meager twenty-one days, with massive energy input required to fuel a single trip._

_Twenty days into the past sounds impressive, but I learned another hard truth through a second testing regimen. Traveling further into the past leads to nearly complete 'temporal immunity.' Time, I reckon, functions like an organism being attacked by a foreign pathogen, like bacteria. Time has less time to react to change when something new is introduced to a system for a limited but impactful period of time. The longer a foreign pathogen in a time stream (a.k.a. me) sticks around, the less effect I have on the future. So I have to try something else. For the first time ever, I venture into uncharted territory._


	3. Chapter I: New Horizons

Waking up was a surprise. Honestly, the whole affair had been a long shot from start to finish. Traveling through time is no picnic, especially when you're relying on untested Muggle theories to make them a reality. One might ask how the hell I managed the whole 'time travel' thing. Honestly, it's simple-yet incredibly dangerous, foolhardy, and relies on the creation of exotic matter to make the whole thing work.

Muggles had already succeeded where the world of wizardry failed. They had created not one but  _several_ ways to travel back in time, depending on whatever method tickled your fancy. A good example would be traveling to the future. Wizards deem it impossible, but it turns out that traveling to the future is easy for a muggle. 'All' you need to do is move fast until time slows down. Muggle astronauts on the International Space Station were the first time travelers, aging at a slightly decreased rate (measured in nanoseconds). That's why clocks on the Space Shuttle and on satellites are actually  _slower_ than the ones on earth. GPS systems actually take this into account! Time dilation leads to fun time travel shenanigans, according to Einstein's theory of relativity.

However, traveling  _back_ in time is no picnic. Even the physics bending powers of the wizard world could not figure out how to truly travel back in time, becoming anchored by the Novikov Self Consistency principle (or Temporal Elasticity principle). Since wizards are generally lazy, illogical people, the international Departments of Mysteries throughout the world abandoned the notion of true time travel to the past-one where the entire course of history could change. This required a hybridization of magic and muggle physics. I might tell you exactly how I did it, but I'm rather frazzled right now. You'll need to give me some time to.  _Heh._

The first thing I heard when I awoke from my harrowing time warping journey was... Scabbers. Squeaking from underneath my pillow. I smiled wanly, dreaming about wrapping my stumpy fingers around the rat's neck and slowly twisting-

"Ron? You coming to breakfast? You've got a big day ahead-"

"Yeah, I'm coming," I said. "Just...Give me a moment."

I fed Scabbers carefully and petted him tenderly, as I always did when I was little. I knew now what lurked underneath the Animagi's mangy skin, and my stomach roiled at the thought. Keeping enemies close, though… That was an opportunity. I slipped on my oversized robes and slowly made my way down to the table. Knives, forks, clatter, and chatter-it was almost deafening to my ears.

My mother frowned. "Ronnie? Is something wrong?"

"Nah, I just had a rough night," I said. "Had an odd dream."

"Ahh, my nerves were frazzled before I went to Hogwarts," my mother said. "Don't worry, it'll work out-you'll see."

I smiled weakly. "I suppose you're right."

The rest of the morning passed in a blur of activity. Breakfast was toast and butter with sliced sausages on top. Though we had woken up early, everyone was already behind schedule… except for me. My trunk had been packed with a few surreptitious charms. I sat patiently on the front porch, away from the ruckus of the house. It gave me a little time to think. The surreal nature of time travel had not truly sunk in, and I found myself moving on autopilot.

"We're here," Dad said. "Kings Cross station."

Ginny surveyed the station with intense curiosity. For her, seeing so much of the muggle world was a rare event. Like many pure-blooded wizards, she had spent most of her life in a bubble. I could hardly blame her for staring at everything.

"How do the Muggles  _manage_ to move those huge trains without magic?" Ginny said.

My dad beamed. "Well, you see-first they make engines out of pieces of metal, and they move because of gears like a clock…"

"Not now," my mother snapped. "Focus, Arthur."

"Right."

We headed down to the platform, with my mother pushing the trolley, which was precariously wobbling from side to side as our luggage threatened to topple off it. Fred and George were murmuring about pranking Filch with dungbombs, and Percy busied himself with looking as mature as he possibly could. My breath hitched, and for a moment I could barely breathe. The nostalgic memories had come to life, a scene of wickedly realistic deja-vu.

"Where's our platform at?" Ginny said.

"Nine and three-quarters, dear," my mother said.

A rumpled-looking kid with cheap plastic glasses and oversized clothes was talking to a station attendant about platform nine and three quarters, but it didn't seem like he was getting anywhere. A snowy owl perched serenely in a cage, and-

"It's Harry Potter," I said.

"What?! Where?" Ginny said.

I didn't deign to answer her. Instead, I split away from my family and headed over to Harry. It was hard to recognize him. He looked so damn  _young._

"Hi," I said. "I'm Ron. Do you need help getting to the platform?"

Harry sighed in relief. "Yeah, that'd be great."

I led him over to the column, where my mother waited patiently. Ginny gawped at Harry, and Fred and George peered over curiously.

"OK, so all you need to do is run through that column there," I said. "Watch."

I grabbed my suitcase and sprinted through the pillar, into the hustle and bustle of platform nine and three quarters. Moments later, Harry dashed through as well, his eyes tightly shut.

"Good show," I said. "What's your name again?"

Harry held out his hand. "Harry."

I shook it, then grinned. "Good to meetcha. Ron Weasley."

I felt like a fraud, talking to Harry as if I was his friend.  _But I was._ Shoving the thought away, I pushed my trolley to the luggage compartment of the train. Harry struggled to lift his suitcase.

"Oh, let me," I said. " _Levioso_."

Harry's heavy suitcase halted in midair, and I gently pushed it into the compartment. After a moment's hesitation, I did the same thing to my suitcase as well.

"Wow," Harry said.

"Come on, let's go," I said.

Before I boarded the train, I made sure to give my parents a hug. Sometimes it's easy to miss the important people in life-mum died a few years before I finished time travel at this massive scale. I didn't even attend my mother's funeral. It was heartless, but I refused to believe I would not see her again.  _I was right, thank Merlin._

"Bye Mum," I said.

"Don't forget to write!" She said. "Have fun at Hogwarts."

"I will!"

Harry stood awkwardly in the corridor of the train, watching me intently as I boarded. This time around, I noticed the wistful look on his face.

"So, why don't we go grab a compartment?" I said.

Harry nodded.

We sat down, and for a moment I we were content to stare at the passerby at the platform. Harry wanted to people-watch for the weirdness of wizards, and I watched to people-watch for... Weirdness. All I could see were ghosts. Dead wizards milled around pillars and waved goodbye to equally doomed children. Sometimes it was easy to forget the impact that Voldemort had on the wizarding community of Britain…But the dead walking around the train served as a grim reminder for the future.

"So," Harry said. "Does everyone know how to use spells?"

"Not really," I said.

"How did you do that spell then?"

"Well, my brothers taught me a few spells, but I'm mostly self-taught. Spells are surprisingly hard to learn," I said.

Harry nodded sagely. "So I won't be...behind or anything?"

"No way. Hardly any first years know any spells going to Hogwarts," I said.

"Oh. That's good."

I flicked my wand into my hand, and Harry gasped. "How'd you do that?"

"Hmm?"

"That thing… Your wand seemed to come from nowhere," Harry said.

"It's not magic, it's sleight of hand," I said. "The wand came from my pockets, see?"

"Oh."

Harry looked genuinely disappointed. From the snippets of the his childhood past that Harry told me about, the poor bastard really had become accustomed to misfortune. I decided to fix that.

"Want to learn a few simple spells before we get to Hogwarts?" I said.

He liked the idea. A lot. The train had picked up speed as he learned, and soon the city of London melted away, with concrete morphing into verdant pastures. We were speeding past fields full of cows and sheep, but Harry wasn't paying them any mind.

"Lumos," he muttered. A light flickered at the end of his wand, then vanished in an instant.

"Put a little more oomph into it," I said.

"Oomph?"

"Magical energy, I guess?" I said.

Harry frowned. "Lumos!"

His wand flickered, then shone with a bright blue light. He grinned, waving his wand in the air like a torch. "Wait, how do I turn this off?"

"Say, 'Nox' and the light will go out," I said.

"Nox."

The light disappeared. Harry was overjoyed. "What's next?"

I began to say something, but there was a great clattering outside in the corridor and a smiling dimpled woman slid back the door to our compartment and said, "Anything off the cart, dears?"

Harry leapt to his feet. As usual, he bought a lot of everything and was happy to share.

For a moment, spells were forgotten, as I explained how every single wizarding candy worked. Stuffed full of wizarding candy, we took a moment to relax. I thanked my young body for being able to handle all the sugary junk at once.

"Where were we again?" Harry said. "Weren't you going to teach me another spell?"

"Alright," I said. "It it's a bit harder, but-"

We were interrupted by a knock on our apartment door, and a boy with a chubby face peered into our compartment.  _Neville._

"Excuse me… Have you seen my toad?"

I sighed. "No, but…  _Accio_  Neville's Toad."

After a moment of anticlimax, a slimy green projectile smacked into my hand. With a confused croak, Trevor dazedly hopped onto Neville's robes.

"You found him!" Neville said.

A familiar child appeared behind Neville, her sproingy hair bouncing like a mass of maroon slinkies. She was already wearing her new Hogwarts robes. "Was that a summoning charm?"

I numbly held out my hand. "Ronald Weasley."

Hermione shook it. "I'm Hermione Granger."

Then she saw Harry's wand. "Oh, you're doing magic? Let's see it then."

Harry wrinkled his face with concentration. "Lumos."

This time, his light summoning spell was perfect. Hermione gave him a nod of approval.

"That one is the easiest - I've tried a few simple spells just for practice and it's all worked for me. Nobody in my family's magic at all, it was ever such a surprise when I got my letter, but I was ever so pleased, of course, I mean, it's the very best school of witchcraft there is, I've heard — I've learned all our course books by heart, of course, I just hope it will be enough-" Hermione said.

Harry blinked.

"Nobody in the entire year will have learned all the course books by heart," I said.

"Oh…Well, I suppose its good to get ahead then," Hermione said. "Who're you?"

"I'm Harry," he said, his wand still alight. "Harry Potter."

"Are you really?" said Hermione. "I know all about you, of course — I got a few extra books for background reading, and you're in  _Modern Magical History_  and  _The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_  and  _Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century_."

"Am I?" Harry said, dazed.

"Goodness, didn't you know, I'd have found out everything I could if it was me," said Hermione. "Do either of you know what House you'll be in? I've been asking around, and I hope I'm in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best; I hear Dumbledore himself was in it, but I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad… Anyway, we'd better go sit down somewhere. "Why don't you sit down with us?" I said.

Harry nodded reluctantly. "I have some candies left…"

We bonded over the various oddities of wizarding candy. Hermione was reluctant to partake at first, since her parents were dentists. However, she relaxed after her second chocolate frog. Neville and Harry began to teach her about each type of candy and what it did, and soon talk about Hogwarts houses were completely forgotten. Halfway through our third bag of Bertie Bott's every flavor beans, the compartment door slid open again.

Three boys entered. Even at their young age, I recognized them instantly.

"Is it true?" he said. "They're saying all down the train that Harry Potter's in this compartment. So it's you, is it?"

Harry surveyed Draco Malfoy and his goons with thinly-veiled distaste. "Yeah, that's my name."

Draco gestured to his goons. "Don't mind them, they're Crabbe and Goyle…My name's Draco, Draco Malfoy-"

"Named after the constellation?" Hermione said.

"Yes, and-"

Hermione did not let him finish.  _Bless her soul._  "Draco means 'dragon' in latin, and was one of the forty-eight constellations named by Ptolemy in the 2nd century. It's also-"

"I know," Draco snapped.

Neville feigned interest. "Who was Ptolemy, Hermione?"

As Hermione began to regale him with tales of 2nd century astrology, Draco whirled to my outstretched hand. Clearly, he was ruffled by the way his meeting with Harry was going.

"No need to ask who you are. My father told me that all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford."

Hermione halted mid-sentence, and Neville stiffened.

I calmly let my hand fall. "You know what they say… Galleons can buy mansions, but not integrity. My family is not rich, but we do not live comfortably on blood money."

His face darkened, but he still turned back to Harry. "You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there."

He held out his hand for Harry to take, but he did not move a muscle. "I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks," he said coolly.

Draco's face reddened. "I'd be careful if I were you, Potter," he said slowly. "Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them, either. You hang around with riffraff like the Weasleys and that Hagrid, and it'll rub off on you."

Both Harry and I stood up. After a moment's hesitation, Hermione and Neville stood up as well.

"If you know what's good for you, you'll stay away from Harry," I said. "Keep your friends-for-hire away from me, Draco."

Crabbe and Goyle advanced anyways, but I repelled them from the compartment with a cursory flick of my wand. Then I used a door-closing charm to halt Draco's retreat.

"First rule of Hogwarts, Draco. Don't start fights you can't finish," I said. "If you test my patience again, I  _could_  transfigure you into a roast chicken and give you to the house elves for carving. That would be a real treat in the  _Daily Prophet._ "

Draco held his wand loosely in his hand, his face paler than usual. Losing his goons had certainly stolen the wind from his sails.

"Leave," Hermione said. "Or I'll tell the prefects that you've been trying to cause trouble."

Neville's face had gone pale, but he nodded.

Crabbe and Goyle were trying to get into the compartment, so I let the door slide open. They fell in a heap on Draco, and his wand dropped to the floor. I summoned it with a charm as he tried to untangle himself from his bodyguards.

"Fetch," I said. I threw his wand down the hall, and banished Draco and his goons from the compartment entirely. Then I sat down calmly, ignoring Hermione's wide-mouthed disbelief.

"How'd you do that?" Neville finally said, after a moment of silence.

"Reading and practice," I said. "We'd better hurry up and change into our robes-the train's almost at Hogwarts."

We took off our jackets and struggled into our robes as the train slowed down. Neville tripped over his own robes twice as he put them on, and Hermione disguised her laughter as a coughing fit. My robes were too short, but this time around, I didn't mind. Shorter robes meant less tripping in a fight.


	4. Chapter II: Inertia

" _Every Object Persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces expressed by it"_

 _-_ Newton's First Law of Motion (viz. Definition of Inertia)

* * *

 

As the sky darkened outside, the train began to slow down. A voice echoed through the train: "We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes' time. Please leave your luggage on the train, it will be taken to the school separately."

Harry crammed his pockets with the last of the sweets, and we joined the throng in the corridor. People pushed their way toward the door and out onto a tiny, dark platform. I cast a silent warming charm to keep the chills of the nighttime air away. After a moment's hesitation, I cast the spell on Harry and Hermione.

"Thanks," Hermione whispered.

"No problem," I muttered.

Then a lamp came bobbing over the heads of the students, and I heard a familiar voice: "Firs' years! Firs' years over here! All right there, Harry?"

Hagrid's big hairy face beamed over the sea of heads.

"C'mon, follow me — any more firs' years? Mind yer step, now! Firs' years follow me!"

Slipping and stumbling, they followed Hagrid down what seemed to be a steep, narrow path. It was so dark on either side of them that-

"Lumos!" Harry muttered, and the path shone with eerie blue light.

I grinned. "Harry, ruining the ambiance…"

"Oh, phooey to the ambiance," Hermione sniffed. "I don't want to trip and twist an ankle. Lumos!"

"Yeh'll get yer firs' sight o' Hogwarts in a sec," Hagrid called over his shoulder, "jus' round this bend here."

There was a loud "Oooooh!"

The narrow path had opened suddenly onto the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.

"No more'n four to a boat!" Hagrid called, pointing to a fleet of little boats sitting in the water by the shore. Harry, Hermione and Neville followed me into the nearest one.

"Everyone in?" shouted Hagrid, who had a boat to himself. "Right then — FORWARD!"

And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead. It towered over us as we sailed closer and closer to the cliff where it stood.

"Heads down!" yelled Hagrid as the first boats reached the cliff; we all bent our heads and the little boats carried us through a curtain of ivy that hid a wide opening in the cliff face.

We were carried along a dark tunnel, took us right underneath the castle, until we reached a kind of underground harbor, where we clambered out onto rocks and pebbles. Hagrid then led us up through a passageway in the rock, which led straight to the front door of Hogwarts. Enchanting, but not when I knew about how much  _longer_ it takes to get to school by lake. There's a reason only the 'Firsties' do it.

"Every'one here?" Hagrid boomed. Then he knocked three times on the castle door.

The door opened at once, revealing a tall, black-haired witch. She wore emerald robes and a stern countenance. Professor McGonagall looked much younger and far less world-weary.

"Follow me," she said brusquely, leading us into a small room off the Grand Hall. I could already make out the drone of voices coming from the Hall, which meant that the rest of the school had already made it here. "The banquet will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you will be sorted into your Houses. The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your House will be something like your family within Hogwarts. You will have classes with the rest of your House, sleep in your House dormitory, and spend free time in your House common room…"

I zoned out as she talked, since I had already heard her spiel before.

"...Move along now, the Sorting is about to begin," Professor McGonagall said.

 _Finally._ I had forgotten how much Professor McGonagall loved hearing her own voice.

I tugged on her robe. "Professor, may I speak to you for a moment? It's about my brothers..."

She sighed. "Make it quick."

"Fred and George...They're going to pull some sort of prank, and I'd like to put a stop to it before it happens. Can I be one of the first to be sorted, so I can tell them off? You know my brothers and how they are..."

McGonagall's eyes widened. "The twins are already at it? I suppose I'll make an exception… But if any pranks occur tonight, I will consider  _you_ responsible."

I nodded. "I'll try my best to stop them, ma'am."

Unbeknownst to her or the faculty, the Weasley twins considered the first day of school to a ceasefire of sorts. In my fifth year, Fred told me that they wanted to make their final year the greatest prank yet, on their seventh year within Hogwarts. Of course, dropping out of Hogwarts threw a wrench in the works.

"Form a line and follow me!" McGonagall barked, and we advanced towards the Sorting Hat, with me near the front of the students as promised.

She was true to her word, calling me out first on the list. Her voice echoed as I stepped towards the hat, and I remembered exactly why the Sorting Hat could mess everything up. The hat can read  _minds._ Hopefully, my rudimentary Occlumens skillset would be enough to protect myself from any mental intrusion. Satisfied, I bounded up to the hat and gently put it on my head.

As soon as the hat fell onto my head, I felt a gentle tug of legilimency and began to prepare mental shields against it. The hat sighed.

"Put down the Occlumens shields," it whispered. "Or I'll do it for you."

I sighed, then let the hat trawl through my mind. Keeping thoughts secret from the hat would probably have horrid consequences, after all. There's no protection of freedom of thought in the wizarding world... Which is probably a massive oversight on the part of the British magical parliament (a.k.a. Wizengamot).

_That's very interesting… Very interesting indeed… In all my years as a Sorting Hat, I've never had the opportunity to Sort a time traveler-_

" _You already know which house I belong to."_ I thought. " _The real question is… which people need to be re-sorted, with the knowledge of the future that you now possess?"_

I could feel the Sorting Hat shiver with excitement.

_What an opportunity… I think the key is young Draco Malfoy. He is the reason you came here early today, isn't it?_

I knew arguing was useless. It already knew what I was thinking, after all. "Yes."

_You want to put him into another house, don't you? Oh, I cannot wait to see that this will do… Thank you for the memories. I shall do what I can to prevent that future from existing._

" _You won't tell anyone, will you?"_ I thought.

_Absolutely not. Even the Headmaster cannot ask me for insights into first year memories, unless household trauma, abuse, or murder is involved. The Founders made sure of that._

" _Thank you."_

"No problem," the Sorting Hat murmured. "You earned my discretion. Better be a GRYFFINDOR!"

I sauntered off to the benches of the Gryffindor table. There, I carefully watched the sorting of the students. Hermione and Neville were sorted into Gryffindor again, which was a joy, but the similarities to the past stopped there. I noticed that some of the high-ranking Slytherin (in the future, at least) were resorted into other houses. Houses where they would not belong, like Hufflepuff. Strategic, really-the hat clearly wanted to change the dynamic. In fact, almost none of the first-year Slytherins  _were_ Slytherin. The first years in Hufflepuff were mostly Slytherins in my past. A few Ravenclaw were thrown into Gryffindor, but most of them stayed where they were.

"Malfoy, Draco!" was called, and I craned my neck out of my seat.

Draco swaggered up to the Sorting Hat. Instead of screaming out 'Slytherin' like usual, the hat began to slowly deliberate. Draco's surety had fallen off his face, and was swiftly replaced with horror. I could see his lips moving silently underneath the hat, faster and faster. They were mouthing some variant of " _Slytherin, Slytherin... Please let me be in Slytherin._ "

The Slytherins at the table began to stare. Crabbe and Goyle looked distinctly uncomfortable. If their leader went into another house, their loyalty would not be assured. They were fair-weather friends, through and through. The entire hall began to fall silent as the hat stalled. Finally, a verdict had been reached.

"BETTER BE A GRYFFINDOR!" The hat shrieked, the loudest cry of the night.

The Great Hall fell completely silent for an instant, then burst into uproar. Crabbe and Goyle refused to look Draco in the eye as he trudged over to our table. I started clapping, and the Gryffindors joined in. From the corner of my eye, I could see the Slytherin ringleaders (and later, Death Eaters) at the green table whisper, with the snakes attempting to fill in the power vacuum left by the erstwhile Slytherin. Nobody at the table tried to talk to Draco, but it did not matter. He had his head cradled in his hands, shielding his face from almost inaudible sobs.

There weren't many people left to Sort now.

"Moon" … , "Nott" … , "Parkinson" … , then a pair of twin girls, "Patil" and "Patil" … , then "Perks, Sally-Anne" … , and then, at last —

"Potter, Harry!"

As Harry stepped forward, whispers suddenly broke out like little hissing fires all over the hall.

"Potter, did she say?"

"The Harry Potter?"

He stepped forward, and Draco's sorting was forgotten. The hat screamed "GRYFFINDOR!" before it even drooped over his head. Which was a surprise, given that the last time around, he had almost been Slytherin. Harry was given the loudest cheer of the entire night.

The rest of the banquet proceeded like it had the first time around. I ate mechanically, yet with a modicum of politeness (instilled by years of marriage). By the time I was finished with my main course, most of the other students had barely started.

Draco picked at his food, so I took the opportunity to tap him on the shoulder.

"What do you want?" he muttered.

"I just want to mention something," I said. "Notice how Crabbe and Goyle aren't following you around anymore?"

He buried his head deeper into his hands. "Shut up, Weasel."

I held up my hands in a display of mock indignation. "All I'm saying is that you should probably apologize to Harry. You're going to live with Gryffindors for the next seven years, so... You might as well be civil."

Draco did not say a word. I took that as an opportunity to continue.

"If your parents had been murdered, I don't think you'd want to hear people putting them down. Just tell him that you're sorry," I whispered. "He'll forgive you, just watch."

Our plates sparkled, and the desserts appeared in their place. "Ah, dessert...Brilliant!" I said loudly. Draco just stared at his plate, and I let him be. He had a lot to think about, after all.

I spent the rest of the night going with the flow. When Dumbledore sang a kooky song, I sang along. When the herd of first years moved, I followed. When we finally made it to the Gryffindor common room, I noticed that Draco looked overwhelmed. Here he was, deep in enemy territory… and the hat had told him that he belonged here. For an instant, I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard.  _Almost._

"Hey, Draco?" I said.

"Yeah?"

I held out my hand. "Fresh start?"

"Fuck off, Weasel."

Draco Malfoy stormed off to his bed, presumably to cry himself to sleep or curse at the ceiling. Knowing him, it would probably be a mix of both.

Hermione sighed. "He's a real gentleman, that one."

Harry smiled, and I knew that Draco must have apologized to him somehow on the way to the Common Room. "Give him time, Hermione. He might come around."

Neville and Hermione snorted in unison.


	5. Ron's Notes

**Ron's Notes, Excerpt II: Unspeakable Evils**

_There is now no doubt left in my mind as to how Time Turners work, at least at a superficial level. I would like to say that I figured out how they work through the careful application of the scientific method, but that would be a lie. Instead of going to all that trouble, I decided to do something far easier. I decided to commit a little...No, a **lot**  of treason. Hermione would have hated the idea, but I had thrown moral quandaries out of the window years ago. So, back to the stealing._

_Breaking into the Department of Mysteries was no longer an easy feat. After a certain battle between Death Eaters and Hogwarts students in the Department of Mysteries, the whole place had undergone some drastic security changes. Now the entire department was locked down tighter than a clam's ass at high tide. To add to my misfortunes, it turns out that one of the 'wonders of Magical Europe' was the vault door to the Department of Mysteries. Nasty protective runes coated a massive silver vault door, carefully crafted by goblins and fortified with House Elf magic. It was, in essence, a massive public relations stunt intended to display unity across all magical races and the Ministry of Magic. Registered Unspeakables were given silver necklaces, which were instilled with blood magic. They ensured that non-employees of the Department of Mysteries could never wear them, unless they wanted to experience instant, brutal decapitation. I would like to say that I somehow broke into that fiddly contraption, but then I would be lying._

_It turns out that having a friend in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had its perks, especially when that friend is Harry Potter, and is the head of that same department. With the careful application of shameless guilt-trips, industrial magic patents, psychology appointments, and beers with Harry… Things slowly fell into place. Eventually the department had no choice but to hire me, though it took a year of wrangling. If you can't beat them, join them. After a probationary period, I will be left to my own devices within the Department of Mysteries, free to churn out top-secret projects that benefit the government and are completely within my own discretion. Knowledge is nearly at my fingertips._..

 


	6. Chapter III: Acceleration

_Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae, et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur._

-Newton's Second Law of Motion (viz. Definition of Acceleration), as written in  _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathemica (1648)._

* * *

I spent the next morning leading the First year students to their classes. Gryffindor would almost always come to class far ahead of the other students, due to my knowledge of the castle and its eccentricities. Most First years were overwhelmed by how the school moved around as it wished, as if it were its own living organism. It would not surprise me if the castle had obtained a form of limited sentience over the years. After all, the whole place was steeped in magic energies.

The first year classes were appallingly easy. I breezed my way through Herbology and Astrology-History of Magic was as boring as ever, and as always I stolidly ignored the droning of professor Binns. It was in Transfiguration that problems began to arise.

"For our first class, we're going to be transfiguring a matchstick into a needle," Professor McGonagall said. "Ronald Weasley? Are you listening?"

I had not been. My hands were busy creating an automaton out of clockwork parts and transfigured odds and ends. Notes were nowhere in sight, since I had completely abandoned the idea of writing them out in classes like these. The ruins of a watch, several ballpoint pens, and a sheet of copper were scattered across my desk.

"I can do the transfiguration, Professor," I said.

"Is that so? In that case, transfigure this match into a needle," McGonagall said. She handed me the match and waited.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Draco smirking. Hermione was glaring at me with disapproval-not listening in class was a blasphemy to her. I tapped the match with my wand, turned it into a perfect needle, then handed it back to her.

"Most interesting, Ronald. Perhaps you have been listening after all. Five points to Gryffindor for this perfect example of transfiguration…"

I fitted the last gear into my mechanical beetle, and it scuttled over to Hermione's desk. It began to dance, and its tiny appendages began to sketch. Lines began to appear on her notebook, until a flattering approximation of her face was drawn in ballpoint pen ink. She blushed. The beetle fluttered its wings, then flitted over to Draco's notebook. It sketched out a dragon, curled around the borders of his notes. He was not bemused, and swatted the beetle away. It shook its little clockwork head and wandered back to me.

Harry leaned over to me. "How'd you make that?"

I shrugged. "I've always been good at making stuff."

Professor McGonagall spied the beetle and wandered over to my desk. "What's this?"

She held the copper beetle up to the light, and the automaton shied away into its shell. "Extraordinary… How did you transfigure this beetle out of that pile of rubbish?"

"I didn't," I said. "I made most of it myself. All those parts fit together, see? Sure, some of it is charmed, but-"

McGonagall pursed her lips. "See me after class, Ronald."

The class let out a collective  _oooh_ , and I numbly nodded. And so I found myself alone in the class of the professor McGonagall, after the rest of the students had filed out. She leaned back into a chair, then rubbed her classes with a handkerchief.

"Frankly," she said. "What you demonstrated during this class is that my curriculum is far above your grade level."

I went for a neutral smile. "You really think so?"

"I saw what you did there with the creation of that beetle. That was extraordinary in itself! But your skills in transfiguration are also far beyond those of your peers, aren't they?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe I am."

She produced a mouse from her pocket. "Turn this into a snuff box, please."

I sighed, then turned the mouse into an exquisite mother-of-pearl and gold snuff box. I realized my mistake right after I performed the spell. McGonagall began to applaud.

"Congratulations, Ronald. You just passed your final exam for this year in transfiguration. Anything else you want to show me?"

 _Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck._ "Am I in any trouble, professor?" I said.

"It depends," she said.

"On what?"

"Whether I can put you in a class that is suitable for your grade level," Professor McGonagall said.

I paused, rapidly cycling through my list of options. Perhaps I could  _obliviate_  the professor, but I did not like my chances in a fight like that, ambush or no. If I  _did_  take a high-level class, I would instantly be singled out as a Firstie prodigy. Too much limelight.  _In for a penny, in for a pound._

"I'm not sure there is a class suitable for my grade level," I said. "Transfiguration has always come easily to me."

"Is that so?" McGonagall said, her face (as always) an enigma. "The snuffbox was impressive, but hardly O.W.L. level."

"I can show you N.E.W.T. level transfiguration," I said.

She stepped back, her wand hand at the ready to shield herself from the potential calamities that come with a student punching above their weight in transfiguration. "Very well."

I tapped a desk with my wand, and it turned into water. It splashed over the floor, and those water droplets had transformed into mercury. The silvery puddle oozed together and formed itself into an amorphous glob. I transformed the mercury into silver, crafting it delicately into a massive statue of a lion. The statue turned into gold, and then was animated with yet another material to animal transfiguration. The lion roared, spraying spittle at the classroom, and-

Professor McGonagall jabbed at the lion with a nonverbal transfiguration, turning it back into an innocuous desk. "Interesting." She smiled wanly. "It seems you are  _indeed_ somewhat of a prodigy."

"Can we keep this a secret?" I said, edging for the door. "I just…"

"I need to discuss this with the Headmaster, and we can figure out where to go from there," Professor McGonagall said. "Clearly, this class is not suited to your grade level."

I winced.  _Should have obliviated her._ Going to Dumbledore could mess everything up.

"Of course, I will not talk to the Headmaster until we establish the extent of your abilities," she said. "Meet me at my office on Friday, and we can discuss our options. Until then, I would advise you to keep this to yourself."

"Please don't tell anyone," I said. "I don't want to be treated differently, you know? Even by other teachers."

"We will explore our options on Friday," she said. "Besides…"

"Besides what?" I said.

"You're running late to potions," Professor McGonagall said. "You'd best be off. First impressions, and all that-"

 _Fuck._ "Oh sweet Merlin, I gotta go," I said.

I ran down the halls, intent on getting to my next class on time. As I ran, I cursed my own stupidity.  _You idiot, showing off in front of Professor McGonagall like that. Fool._  I prayed that she would keep her mouth shut-at least until Friday. Lost in my own thoughts, I did not look up, and I slammed straight into a student. We tumbled down onto a landing, scattering the contents of his bookbag everywhere. I brushed myself off.

"Bollocks."

"Why didn't you look where you were going?!" Draco snapped.

I swiped my wand through the air, and Draco's homework neatly piled itself into his bookbag. "Come on, we're going to be late," I said. "Follow me."

We dashed past portraits and suits of armor that tried to trip us. "We're going the wrong way!" Draco shouted.

"Shush," I said. "Watch."

I tickled a section of wall that was hidden behind a massive tapestry of a unicorn, and a wall slid out of the way to expose a slide. "Ladies first," I said.

Draco balked.

"Guess I'm the lady, then," I said. With that, I neatly leapt onto the slide. The polished granite slide dropped steeply. Gut-wrenching turns and drops led inexorably downwards, and after half a minute I tumbled out of a grate near the potions classroom. I waited a moment, and Draco slid along the slimy floor, hitting a wall as he went.

"My robes-"

"Sod your robes, if you don't hurry we're going to be late to class!" I said. "Snape's going to kill us."

I still cast a  _scourgify_ charm at Draco's robes as we ran. Despite our accident, we arrived at class with a minute to spare.

"Where've you been?" Hermione hissed. "If you were late, we would have lost house points!"

Harry sighed. He must have heard her rant far too many times to give a damn. "I'm more worried about Snape. I've heard he's a harsh grader."

Draco groaned. "He tutored me at home this summer. He's strict, and he doesn't tolerate any stupidity…So  _you_  lot will mess it all up."

I remembered to whisper a few things to the mechanical beetle, so it was halfway into a sketch of answers and diagrams on Harry's notes when Snape finally walked in. He took roll call and began to go through the names of his students. As he had last time, he paused at Harry's name.

"Ah  _yes,_ " Snape breathed. "Harry Potter. Our new... _Celebrity_."

This time, I noticed that Draco didn't laugh. His face was frozen into a half-hearted sneer.

"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making," he began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but we caught every word. "As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses. … I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."

More silence followed this little speech. Harry and I exchanged looks with raised eyebrows. Hermione Granger was on the edge of her seat and looked desperate to start proving that she wasn't a dunderhead. I yawned.

"Potter!" said Snape suddenly. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Harry faltered, but then he looked down. My beetle had finished writing out 'Draught of the Living Death' in block letters on his notes. "Um… The Draught of the Living Death, sir?"

Snape's malicious smile froze in place. "Good. And where would I find a bezoar?"

Harry now got the drill. He pondered for a moment, then surreptitiously checked his paper for the answer. "From the stomach of a goat, sir. It's an antidote to most poisons."

"Perhaps I had underestimated you, boy...But rote memorization isn't everything," Snape hissed. "Weasley! What's the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

"None, sir," I said. "It's also called Aconite. The plant's a deadly poison."

Snape's mood worsened as the Gryffindors worked. We were supposed to make a potion to cure boils. I paired up with Hermione and completed the potion before most of the class had even begun. Draco and Harry were not far behind. In comparison, the Slytherins were only halfway through their potions. I helped avoid catastrophe with Neville and Seamus by secretly throwing in ingredients to their potion whenever Snape turned around. By the time the class was finished, I was exhausted. Potion making never was my strong suit.

"Ron, are you coming over to Hagrid's?" Harry said, as we filed out of the class.

"Sorry mate," I said. "I'm knackered."

Draco sighed. "I've got some studying to do." Then he realized he wasn't even invited, and flushed pink.

"OK," Harry said.

Hermione and Neville ended up going with Harry, while Draco and I headed to the Common Room… Or so he thought.

"We're going the wrong way again," Draco said. "Are you taking a shortcut or something?"

"No," I said. "We're not going to the common room."

I jogged up a flight of stairs, making sure to jump over a vanishing step. Draco followed along. "Where are we going, then?"

"We?" I said. "Aren't I scum of the wizarding earth or something?"

Draco halted. "I'll just go, then."

I sighed. It was probably better to build rapports than destroy them, after all. Besides, even Slytherins are impressionable at twelve years old. "You can come with. How good are you at keeping secrets?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Don't stall on me, Malfoy," I said. I leapt to another flight of stairs. "If you had to keep a secret from literally everyone, would you be able to keep it?"

"Malfoys are excellent at keeping secrets," Draco said. His chest puffed out proudly, and I resisted the urge to laugh.

We arrived at the seventh floor, and I began to pace around, right across from a tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. After the third time crossing the threshold, a door popped into existence.

"What the-"

"Welcome to the Room of Requirement," I said.

In front of me, stacks of books dominated the left-hand side of the room. A cozy desk with hovering lights was placed in the corner, away from the right hand side of the room. On the right hand side stood a tidy workshop, with all the knickknacks that a technomancer would ever need.

"Where in the name of Merlin are we?" Draco said.

"As I said, it's the Room of Requirement. It gives you what you need."

"Amazing…"

"If you tell anyone about this place, I'll crochet a scarf out of your small intestines," I said cheerily.

"Malfoys keep secrets."

"Swear on your family name, blood purity, and magic, that you won't tell anyone," I said. "If you don't, I'll just _obliviate_  you and throw you out into the corridor."

Draco paled. "What's in this place?"

"Oath," I said. "Then answers."

It took surprisingly little to no cajoling. The promise of power to a Slytherin was too tempting. Especially when the alternative is being  _obliviated_ by a First year (which normally would result in brain damage).

"Alright," I said. "This place gives you what you want. No food, obviously-but anything else. You have a good place to study over there."

I pointed to a cozy nook, crammed with First Year materials, study guides, syllabi, and a desk with plenty of light. A miniature potions lab took up another desk, complete with materials and basic cauldrons. Draco's mouth dropped. For once, he had nothing smarmy to say. He wandered around the potions lab and desk, testing his chair and sighing as the seat-back slowly massaged his back.

"How did you find this place?" he finally said, eyes half-lidded from the massage chair. "It's nowhere in-"

" _Hogwarts, a History_ ," I finished. "This school has many secrets, and this happens to be one of them."

"So how  _did_  you find this place?" Draco said.

"As you know, I have a large family-"

He snorted. "You Weasels breed like rabbits."

I decided to ignore the jab. "My brother Percy is a Prefect, and the twins are troublemakers. They know a lot about the old place, and told me about some of its secrets."

Draco's eyes opened. "So there's more. Secrets, that is."

"Loads," I said. "Of course, secrets need to stay that way."

"Hmm," he muttered, nearly asleep in the chair. "Unless I earn your trust."

"Hell will freeze," I muttered. "Anyhow, I'll be busy inventing stuff in my workshop."

"What kind of stuff?" Draco said.

"Muggle stuff. You're a pureblood, so it probably won't be too interesting to you."

"You're right. That does sound awfully boring," Draco said, though his eyes glittered with curiosity. "I'll just be writing my nine inches on Binn's essay."

I nodded, then got to work. I saw that Draco was sitting down in his corner, with the stacks of books obscuring his vision. To make sure that I wouldn't be disturbed, I transfigured a heavy woolen curtain out of a sheet of plywood, then hung it across the entrance to my workshop. With the grace of an orchestral conductor, I tapped my wand against the workbench and began to enchant the tools to dance around under my command. My beetle sketched out the schematics I had spent weeks outlining and tools leapt around, following my commands carefully-machined copper pieces came slowly came together in a pile.

I would be fitting a multitude of parts into a miniscule amount of space. The first thing I would be creating would be the base item. It had taken some deliberation, but I decided that it would take the form of a small signet ring. The machines began to create it in the background, and assembled the parts necessary to form the second 'tier' of my creation. With another swish of my wand, the parts began to wander around in the air, fitting together like the pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle. Once I was satisfied with the overall result, I let the pieces fit together. Then I slowly took apart the pieces and labelled them.

I had pioneered in the art of the Undetectable Extension Charm-I guard its secrets closely. Viewed from an engineer's perspective, the charm could make the impossible reality-instead of worrying about the miniaturization of parts and the nuisance that is limited space, I could fit massive motors into the tiniest of contraptions. As far as I know, no other wizard has used the spell in this manner. As usual, father gave me the idea: if you can fit a bench into a car's back seat, why not extra parts in the hood?

This was just the start. I slid on jeweler's goggles and heated up a red-hot pin to painstakingly inscribe runes into every single component. After the runes were inscribed, I began to enchant every piece. Most of them had Undetectable Extension Charms on them, as the amount of machinery I was going to fit into the ring would be staggering. Another issue was the weight, which I also had to reduce. Durability and material strength were just as important.

My beetle automaton inscribed as I recited runes. Runic enchantments are complicated to get right, but when they all fit together the spells could harmonize like a symphony. If put together wrong, it wouldn't work well-the results would be like an entire orchestra comprised of first-year musicians attempted Vivaldi's four seasons. Once that layer of enchantment was applied, I carefully began to enchant each piece with charms placed on top of the runes.

Finally, I examined the fruits of my labor. A half-complete revolver based off a Colt Single Action Army gleamed, its burnished silver shining in the light of my workshop. My beetle pushed along a complete copper signet ring, inscribed with the sign of a phoenix rising from a pile of ashes.

"Perfect," I said. The machines within the workshop halted momentarily, as if witnessing the events that were just about to unfold. I cast yet another Undetectable Extension Charm on the revolver and began to fit the components of the revolver into the signet ring. "When I press this, it  _should_  turn into that…" I muttered.

My signet ring gleamed, then morphed into a revolver, which comfortably fit within my stubby child hands.  _The draw time takes too long… I'll need to fix that._  I decided that I had finished enough of the project for today. Working like this was a marathon. I felt like crawling into my bunk and falling asleep for an entire week.

"Weasel?"

I flicked a button on the side of the revolver, and it slid back into a signet ring. "Yeah?"

"It's almost dinnertime," Draco said. "I've finished three essays by now. What were you up to all that time?"

I showed him my signet ring.

"That looks goblin-made," he said drily. "Are you a goblin?"

"I'll take that as a compliment," I said. "Prick."

We headed downstairs to dinner, which consisted of mutton, peas and a good serving of banter about sports and broomsticks. Draco had regained some of his former cockiness, and he was boasting about that time he escaped Muggles in a helicopter to anyone who would listen.

I could see Harry's worry sketched into his face. I smiled. "You're going to do well during that broomstick lesson, Harry. I can tell."

"Thanks," he muttered.

"You too, Hermione," I said. "Just make sure to  _command_  the broomstick."

She nodded. "How, though?"

Learning through books had always been her strong suit, but flying required some mental fortitude, determination, and above all… Believing that you  _can_ fly. I told her so.

"Hermione, you rely on books for knowledge, and that's great… But you need to trust yourself when you get on that broom.  _Know_ that you can do it, and it will help a lot."

To my surprise, Draco nodded. "The broom mimics your mental state, so being calm or happy will help you fly. Of course, Purebloods are the best broom flyers, but-"

"Had to ruin the moment," I muttered.

Hermione smiled. She had wisely chosen to ignore Draco's unfalteringly racist rant, and instead stared at her potatoes, lost in thought.

Harry seized the opportunity and stole her Yorkshire pudding with the swiftness of a future seeker.

" _Petrificus Totalus_ ," Hermione muttered, and Harry froze, his face still stuck in a premature face of victory, hand still holding the pudding. Draco snorted despite himself, and dinner resumed at a cheerier (and less racist) pace. I was content to watch, though I did crack a joke here and there. Under the table, my fingers fiddled with my signet ring. The pieces my plan were coming together...


	7. Ron's Notes

**Ron's Notes (Excerpt III): Testing Temporal Theories**

_My probation period as an Unspeakable was longer than anticipated. Of course, my probation technically ended a month and a half ago, but my pocket Sneakoscope revealed the truth of my tenuous position within the department. While I could not see who was watching, it was clear that someone or something had to be tracking my movements around the entire facility. I reacted accordingly, releasing lucrative projects which relied upon the resources within the Department of Mysteries, yet did not have anything to do with the Temporal Research department._

_Technically there would have been no backlash for researching the Temporal travel and its applications as soon as I had been appointed Unspeakable, but I knew that Harry's view of time travel (and by association, research surrounding time travel) was not favorable. The events of 2020 assured me of that. While I had been part of the highly classified mission to 'remove' the timelines that Theodore Nott's time turner had created, I did not have enough data to explore the differences between old Time Turners and Nott's Time Turner._

_I had hit a brick wall in my research. The mystery surrounding Theodore Nott's Time Turner had to be solved if I was going to get anywhere. So I decided to think outside of the box. Scorpio Malfoy and Albus Potter were the ones with the data-all I needed to do was extract it from them. As I patiently toiled away in the Department of Mysteries and waited for my probation period to end, I set up a secret meeting with Scorpio Malfoy._

_At first he resisted the effects of Veritaserum, which was a drawback. However, It was no easy task, jugging Veritaserum, an Imperius Curse and Legilimency all at once… But the fruits of my labor were worth it. I managed to extract and duplicate the last two years of his memory banks, which I then poured into a flask created for the occasion. Finally, I obliviated the poor bastard. He had a seven-minute time gap in his memory, but he never figured it out. After that whole forgotten ordeal and a masterful application of the Confundus charm, Scorpio dutifully played chess with me for about an hour or so before going home by Floo. Ahh, ignorance is truly bliss._

_It took me a week to fashion a Pensieve to hold all of Scorpio's duplicated memories, and another month to collate and interpret the data that he had unwittingly provided. From what I could see, Theodore Nott's Time Turner did not truly travel back in time. All it did was transport its user to parallel universes. In this way, it did not violate the Temporal Elasticity principle, allowing its user to travel further into the past than its older counterparts. This is not time travel, because it does not truly allow for change along a single timeline. Another issue with this form of temporal travel was illustrated by Scorpio's nasty misadventures as he jumped from parallel universe to parallel universe. Parallel universes simply are not supposed to interact with one another in this way, and changes made in parallel universes could cause ripple effects and the creation of unlikely scenarios. Furthermore, it is incredibly easy to become lost in a deluge of universes._

_Satisfied with my understanding of Theodore Nott's Time Turner, I refocused my attention to the Department of Mysteries 'Time Room.' Hopefully the gamble of becoming a government Unspeakable will pay off, but only time_ _will tell._


	8. Chapter IV: Equal and Opposite Reactions

_Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi._

-Sir Isaac Newton, Law of Reciprocal Actions ( _Principia Mathematicia_ , 1687)

* * *

 

Our first class on the broom went disastrously. Draco's personality changed drastically with his peers around. He laughed at all the students that were struggling to fly, and he laughed when Neville broke his wrist after a nasty fall.

"You're not among Slytherins anymore," I whispered. "Cut it out."

Draco sneered ignored me. "Look, Neville dropped that thing his gran gave him!" The Remembrall glittered in the sun as he held it up.

My blood chilled at the sudden deja vu.

"Give that here, Malfoy," said Harry quietly. Everyone stopped talking to watch.

Malfoy smiled nastily. The Slytherins were watching intently now. I knew that Malfoy would attempt to regain some credibility within the snakes, but I didn't think he'd go this far.

"I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find —?"

"Give it here!" Harry yelled, but Malfoy had leapt onto his broomstick and taken off. He hadn't been lying, he could fly well. Hovering level with the topmost branches of an oak he called, "Come and get it, Potter!"

Harry grabbed his broom.

"No!" shouted Hermione Granger. "Madam Hooch told us not to move — you'll get us all into trouble."

Harry ignored her. He mounted the broom and kicked hard against the ground and up, up he soared. He pulled his broomstick up a little to take it even higher. I watched bemusedly as Harry jousted with Draco in midair.

"Give back the Remembrall or I'll knock you off that broom!" Harry yelled.

Draco smirked. "I don't care what happens-if I get in trouble it is  _Gryffindor_ that loses the points anyways."

He smirked at glanced at the other Slytherins to gauge their reactions. It was only a moment, but a moment was all Harry needed. Harry sped at him while he was busy watching the Snakes, and the wannabe Slytherin did not react in time. Harry's broomstick slammed into Draco's upper chest with a sickening  _crunch._ Hardened wood splintered, and Draco fell through the air, falling three stories-

I nonverbally cast a cushioning charm underneath Draco, and he landed in a dazed heap. More than his breath had been knocked out of him. Attempting to inhale made him scream silently in pain. The Slytherins cheered, delighting in Malfoy's humiliation. Harry's broom began to malfunction from the damage, and he landed roughly on the turf.

"What a failure-"

"That idiot  _belongs_ in Gryffindor," cried another.

"HARRY POTTER!"

Professor McGonagall did not see that Malfoy had been injured, and she simply ushered Harry off the pitch as usual. Somehow, she hadn't noticed his condition... Or, perhaps the Professor had ignored it entirely. Draco silently gasped on the ground, and the Slytherins filed past without giving him a second glance. In an act of pity, I pulled Draco out of the dirt.

"This'll hurt," I said. " _Episkey._ " I had been an Auror for years, so setting a broken rib was not going to be an issue.

Draco gasped as his ribs ground into place. I invoked several healing spells at once-one to fuse the fractured rib together, one decrease swelling and another prevent bleeding. As an afterthought, I used a diagnostic charm to make sure his rib hadn't punctured his lung.

"You're fine," I said. "All you need now is to take it easy. Your rib will be weaker for about a week or so, but after that you'll be perfectly healthy."

Hermione surveyed my work skeptically. "Are you sure?"

"'Course. I live in a magical family with rowdy brothers. Why wouldn't I know basic first aid?" I said.

Draco silently got to his feet and hobbled off the Quidditch pitch, disregarding the fact that he'd be skipping a class. Madam Hooch was still nowhere to be seen.

"Let's ditch," I said placidly. "This class sucks."

"You can't just  _leave_  classes, we'll lose points, and get detention, and-"

I laughed. "For broomstick lessons? Nobody cares. Most of the Slytherins already ditched."

Hermione still hesitated.

"Come on," I said. "Let's see that Gryffindor bravery."

She sniffed. "I'm not a truant! Besides, I don't want to get in trouble."

"I'll show you a secret passage," I said. "And we'll go on an adventure. Or… Or you could stay here with your broomstick."

I began to walk away, whistling a cheery tune. I was halfway to the castle when I heard the unmistakeable sound of Hermione catching up.

"Wait," she gasped. "I'm coming with you."

I grinned. "I knew you'd come around."

We were walking through the Grand Hall when Hermione frowned. "Where are we going, anyways?"

"Third floor," I said.

"Wait, you don't mean-"

"Yeah."

"But Dumbledore said-"

"...that the  _third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death_. Yes, I know. But doesn't it strike you as  _odd_?"

Hermione halted halfway up the Grand Staircase. "What do you mean?"

"Come on, you're the smartest witch in our year.  _Think_ about it. Why would the corridor be off limits?" I said.

"To keep students from wandering into the corridor and getting hurt,  _obviously._ "

"Wrong," I said.

Hermione blinked. For a moment she just seemed confused, but then the penny dropped. "Of  _course_ Dumbledore doesn't want anyone to get hurt, he's the  _Headmaster_ -"

"Who possesses the power and clearance required to block off  _any_ corridor from  _any_ student within Hogwarts if he wanted to," I said. "Without making any melodramatic statements or even letting students know that there's a potential danger within Hogwarts."

Now we were at the second floor, and rapidly climbing. Hermione was lost in thought. "What you say makes sense...In a far-fetched way. But why would the Headmaster want to endanger his students?"

"To test them," I said.

We arrived at the entrance of the forbidden door, and Hermione stared at it apprehensively.

"This is a terrible, terrible idea," Hermione muttered.

"If Dumbledore really wanted this door protected, there would be enough enchantments on this door that it would take an army of Aurors to get in," I said. "It wouldn't be made out of wood."

"What if the wood was enchanted?" Hermione said.

" _Enchantus Revalio,_ " I muttered. "There's nothing on the door. Even the lock isn't wizard-grade. If I'm right, it would only take a simple  _Alohomora_ to open this door. If it doesn't, we go back. Deal?"

Hermione fidgeted in place, though her eyes shone with excitement. "Fine. Do it."

" _Alohomora_ ," I whispered.

The door quietly swung open by a fraction of an inch on its well-greased hinges.

"Let's go," I said.

I ushered Hermione into the room, and for a moment our eyes adjusted to the light. A lump began to move on the floor.

"Don't move," I hissed. "It's the first test."

Hermione froze as the cerberus snarled from the floor. The lump formed into a towering three-headed dog. 'Fluffy' did not look fluffy at all. It snarled.

"Ron," Hermione said. "We need to get out of here."

"Not yet," I muttered. "It's a Cerberus, and according to Newt Scamander's Magizoology books..."

I pulled a music box from my robes; it had been constructed during a particularly boring History of Magic class.

" _Sonorus._ " The sound within the music box would now be amplified.

"Hermione, take the box and turn the handle. I'll distract it."

" _What?!_ "

"Just turn the bloody handle," I snapped. My wand flickered through the air, and a jet of water sprayed into the Cerberus's mouth. While one of the heads were distracted, I conjured a stream of transfigured birds to distract the other. Hermione began to crank the handle, and music spilled through the room.

The Cerberus swiped at me with an enormous paw, but I had already rolled away. It tried to lunge at me, but every attempt to attack became lazier and lazier. The massive beast halted mid-snarl, falling heavily to the ground. One of its heads slobbered onto my robes. Quite frankly, the whole debacle had been far too close for comfort. Instead of stressing Hermione out, I decided to go for bravado.

"Ah, that won't wash out easily," I sighed. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

Hermione hyperventilated, her hand still rapidly cranking the music box. It took her a minute to calm down and collect her wits. "How did you know that music would make it fall asleep?"

"The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice," I said. "Dumbledore wants students to figure out puzzles with wits, not magical ability. It needs to be difficult to get through, but easy enough for a first year to get through relatively unscathed."

"Your theory makes sense," Hermione said. "If the Headmaster really wanted to keep people out, he could have housed a dragon within a small room disguised with an Undetectable Extension Charm-or used one of the secret rooms of Hogwarts for extra security."

"Exactly," I said, pulling the trapdoor open. "It's a test, and I want to see it through."

Hermione cautiously tiptoed to the edge of the trapdoor. She took one look down and shook her head. "We're done."

I whistled. "That's a long drop. But remember, we're wizards and witches. Drops don't kill with a simple cushioning charm, or  _Arresto Momentum._ They're both first and second year charms, respectively."

"There is absolutely no way I'm going down there," she huffed.

"Behind you!" I shouted.

Hermione fell for it. Literally, since I had pushed her the moment she looked away. I leapt in with her, casting a nonverbal cushioning charm on both of us before we hit the Devil's Snare.

"See?" I said. "Not a problem at all-"

Hermione slapped me across the face. It was actually impressive, especially when it echoed around the chamber. She then swore luridly.

"Merlin," I breathed. "If I had a saucer of milk, you would have curdled it by now. Where'd you learn to cuss like that?"

"That wasn't  _funny_ , Ron!"

"I know," I said. "You're fine though, right?"

"...Yeah," Hermione said. "I'll give you that. If you pull a stunt like that again though-"

The devil's snare was curling around our ankles, and I waited for Hermione to notice.

"Where are we?" I said.

"Lumos," Hermione said.

The floor writhed away from her, repulsed by the light.

"Oh, look. A harmless plant," I said.

"It's  _grabbing me_ ," Hermione shrieked. " _Incendio!_ "

A gout of flame burst out of her wand, and we fell as the plant recoiled from the heat. We landed heavily on the stone floor, though I had managed to transfigure the stonework into foam-like talc at the last moment.

"Yeah," Hermione said, while stomping a solitary tendril of the plant to death. "This is too easy. Any third year would have an easy time getting this far, much less an actual  _thief._ "

"What can we conclude, then?" I said.

"This is a test," Hermione said. Her eyes gleamed, as they always did whenever she became too competitive for her own good.

 _It's good to see Hermione again, and to see those gleaming eyes again... Was worth the wait._ I swallowed a lump in my throat. "Let's see what's next, shall we?"

Hermione and I walked ever downwards. Trickling water could be heard throughout the underground passageway, and the stone walls were damp to the touch. It led into a brilliantly ostentatious gold room. A flock of multicolored keys fluttered around the ceiling. A wood and silver door held a lock, which obviously could not be opened with an easy charm.

"This one is harder," I said. "Look, there's the brooms on the wall. If we play this task by the rules, we're supposed to fly and grab the right key to put in that lock. Again, it's based on skill and not magical talent."

Hermione sighed. "This is where we have to go back, then. Neither of us can get those keys-they're moving too fast. Besides, I can't even summon my broom, much less  _fly._ "

"So it's getting harder," I said. "I never said it wouldn't be difficult. It's still possible, though. Watch."

I began to create a thunderstorm on the ceiling, complete with heavy drops of rain and dashes of thunder. The droplets of water landed on the wings of the keys, soaking them completely.

Hermione looked on in awe. "How did you do that?"

"It's based off a spell from North America," I said. "Native Americans used it to summon rain to feed their crops and protect themselves from invaders."

"Now what?" Hermione cried, spelling away the rain from her robes.

"Transfiguration," I said. The water turned into hot toffee, which then hardened into lead. The wings on the keys could not flutter anymore, and they fell like rocks. The keys clattered to the floor unceremoniously.

"Those were  _not_  first year transfigurations," Hermione said. "Or even third year."

"I read ahead," I said. "I had to improvise for this one, because I really suck as a Seeker. Now all we have to do is find the right key."

"Someday you'll tell me how you learnt years of transfiguration magic before you stepped foot in that classroom," Hermione said. "That transfiguration in class was too quick-you obviously practiced before."

"Maybe someday," I said. "But not today."

Hermione nodded. "We need to find one that fits..."

She rapidly sorted through the keys, finally settling on one with blue wings and a silver body. "This one looks like it'll fit."

It did. The door swung open, and we cautiously trudged into our next task.

"Wow," Hermione breathed.

This chamber was so dark that it was impossible to see the boundaries of it. We cautiously strode forward, letting the light of our wands illuminate our way to the middle. A giant chess set had been created

"Looks like we'll have to play ourselves across," I said. "Whoop de doo."

"More intelligence-based tasks," Hermione muttered. "Your theory makes sense..."

I nodded, then strode forward to the chessboard. This time, we didn't even need to take the places of fallen pieces.

"You any good at playing?" Hermione said.

"Pretty good. Watch."

White took its turn, moving its pawn to E4. I decided to take the Sicilian defense, by moving my pawn to C5. Then I began to push my way to the front of the board. Hermione watched attentively as the game progressed. My turns were almost instantaneous.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Hermione shouted, over the crash of one of my pieces being thrown to the side of the board.

"I think I do," I said. Professor McGonagall probably only had the skills of an expert, not a chessmaster. This time, I did not have to make up for the fact that none my pieces were composed of friends. Within five minutes, I had the king trapped.

"Queen to G3," I said. "Checkmate."

The white king kneeled, then threw his crown to the ground. It clattered to the floor, and we gingerly advanced past the beaten pieces.

"Onwards?" Hermione said.

"Onwards," I confirmed.

We pushed past a heavy door, and a disgusting stench slammed into my nostrils. "It's a troll," I whispered. By then, it was too late. The door closed with a firm  _click_ of locks being engaged. Torches lit, illuminating the outline of a massive guard troll. Hermione held her wand out in front of her, and I readied for battle.

"Look," I said. "Can we talk-"

"RARHGHHHHHH!" A club smashed into the space I had been occupying a moment earlier. If I hadn't been careful, I would have been turned into a smear of tomato paste.

" _Petrificus Totalus_!" Hermione cried, but the spell slid off of the troll's hide. It advanced forward, preparing to charge-

" _Colloshoo_ ," I said. The spell hit the troll in its unarmoured armpit, and the troll's feet clung to the ground. "Oi, ugly!"

The troll turned around, and I nailed it in the eyes with a perfectly timed Conjunctivitis curse. Its eyes swelled shut, and the troll bellowed in agony. It flailed wildly, and I took the opportunity to animate a knight sculpture within the room. As the blinded troll tore the statue to pieces, I pulled Hermione through the doorway and into the next room. As the door closed, a wall of purple flames appeared behind us. A few metres in front of us was a wall of black fire, halting our advance.

"That wasn't a first year task!" Hermione shrieked.

"But we made it, didn't we?" I gasped.

"You have a point, but we could have  _died_!" Hermione said.

"Dumbledore wouldn't let us get harmed," I said, lying through my teeth.

"We need to get  _out_ of here," she snapped.

"I'm not sure if we can leave before finishing the tasks," I said.

"Fine," she muttered. "Let's see what's next."

It was the logic puzzle, with potion bottles that could either kill, do nothing, or let us through the black flames. Hermione was thrilled at the prospect of solving a logic puzzle, so I let her figure it out. After only a few minutes, she snagged the two fire protection potions.

"Good job with the puzzle."

"Thanks," Hermione said. "If I'm wrong…"

I downed my potion in one gulp. "You're not wrong."

She tentatively drank hers, and we walked through the black fire together. We halted in front of the mirror of Erised, and I began to whisper in her ear…


	9. Ron's Notes

**Ron's Notes (Excerpt IV): Magical Metallurgy**

_My father died before Hermione Granger became the Minister of Magic. When I heard that he had passed away, I distinctly remember turning to Hermione and telling her that I needed a stiff drink. The stiffest. She agreed, so we took the Floo to the Leaky Cauldron and bought four bottles of Firewhisky back to our shared apartment above 'Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.' That night, she put her political campaign on temporary hold. Harry apparated to our humble abode, and we all sat around a dingy table in the apartment and downed shots until we became roaringly drunk._

_Harry told us all what dying felt like after his sixth shot of the evening. I vaguely remember what he told us about death, and I think it was deeply moving… But the entire night was a patchwork haze. Hermione and I drank until we were on the verge of passing out. Harry blacked out on our bed. George's face had reddened, but he was nowhere near our drunken state. Fred's death had led him to the insidious embrace of alcoholism, so he was still knocking down shots of Firewhisky as if they were water. Hermione and I fell asleep on the sofa, tangled in a despondent heap of intoxicated mourning._

_George's mental state had never really recovered from the Battle of Hogwarts, and at that time we did not recognize the impact that my father's sudden death had on his psyche. My memories of my father's funeral were overshadowed by George's first (and last) suicide attempt, mere days after Arthur Weasley was interred in the Weasley graveyard. I found him in our shared apartment, hanging from a transfigured hook on his bathroom ceiling, his face a splotchy purple. A posthumous autopsy revealed that he had slugged two Dreamless Sleep potions before he kicked the chair over. His note was a simple apology to my mother, a signed release paper for all his patents (to be released publicly) and a gut-wrenchingly simple phrase: 'Harry said that it was peaceful there. I miss Fred, and I can't keep smiling anymore. Please don't hate me.' I cut away the first sentence of his note with a careful cutting charm and burned it with an Incendio before the Mediwizards arrived at the scene. Harry would never know. It would destroy him, as it destroyed me in the years to come._

_His death ruined me. Nobody knew what to say or do. I had dropped out of the Ministry's Auror program in order to take care of George and his beloved business, so I felt personally responsible for his death. Hermione's appointment as Minister of Magic was close at hand, and she tried her best to be there for me, but… There was only so much she could do. Harry was just **busy**. He came over whenever he could, but as the new head of the DMLE and a full-time father, he was… very busy. I could not fault him for not really being there, but I did anyhow. We grew apart._

_Grief touches us all differently. I isolated myself in the closed Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and surrounded myself with all the knicknacks my father and George left behind in their wills. I ended up having a lot of spare time on my hands, so I slowly read through their collective notes. George's notes were interesting, but mostly provided strategies to charm 'Weasley Wizard Wheezes' products. I read through them anyways, to honor his memory. However, my father's workshop materials were wild cards. Arthur Weasley was an ingenious inventor, and we had never known it. His schematics on his heavily modified Ford Anglia were groundbreaking applications of magical theory to Muggle science. He had written a treatise on enchanting materials and their subsequent effects, which expanded the current theories behind charming material items._

_Most of his research materials came directly from wizarding libraries, which meant that the lion's share of his work were based off outdated classical Muggle books, which were written in Latin or Greek. It certainly explained why his ideas on how the Muggle world worked sounded zany to other Muggles. The pieces were fitting together, now. A mysteriously enigmatic stack of leather-bond workbooks remained, carefully bound in a single satchel. They were written in a mystifying bastardization of Greek and Latin, and took much longer to decode._

_It was a goldmine of knowledge. Sometimes there would be notes written in the margins about potential spell applications, a brief summary of a testing routine, or drafts of magical theorems. My father did not patent or attempt to use his theories on a larger scale, for fear of potential misuse. I felt like I had never truly known my father until I had read his life's work. There was just **so much**  to read. The satchel with its Undetectable Extension Charm contained two-hundred and thirty eight notebooks written over the course of his life. I hoarded them like a dragon hoards its gold, intent on unraveling the mystery of my father and the knowledge contained within. Only Hermione and I were privy to the contents of these notebooks, and only because I sometimes needed her help to explain what the hell my father had written._

_After learning and applying the principles that my father had established within a controlled setting, Hermione and I became bolder. I threw myself into my father's work, allowing it to consume me utterly. By the time I had finished reading, editing, and expanding upon my father's notes, I had become remarkably adept at transfiguration. Eventually, I could apply my father's transfiguration theorems to create permanent transfiguration, which revolutionized my inventions… Changing buttons into parts, I could create pocket watches which lasted permanently._

_My first full-scale fight with Hermione was over the nature of these transfiguration theorems, and whether they could be released to the public. I refused to release the theorems. I had already committed them to memory, so I burned the three pertinent transfiguration notebooks to ensure that Hermione could never release them to the general public. This was my father's legacy, and I would **not**  let her take that away from me._


	10. Chapter V: Chaos Theory

Chapter V: Chaos Theory

"They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'  
And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window."   
―Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

After some cajoling on my part, Hermione was ready to 'receive our reward' from Dumbledore. We bounded up to the Gargoyle corridor and stopped in front of the Headmaster's office.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?" Hermione said.

"Quite sure," I said. "Absolutely."

"It looks like a gargoyle, not an office," she said. "Are you pulling my leg?"

"It needs a password," I said. "Dumbledore loves sweets, so the password is always a candy. Acid pop!"

It did not work. Hermione sighed.

"Uhm… Sherbet lemon?" I said.

The gargoyle slid aside to reveal the stairway up to his office.

"Not bad for my second try," I muttered.

"What'd you say?" Hermione said.

"Uh, nothing really," I said. "We should get going."

We stepped on the staircase, and Hermione tried to take a step up. I stopped her.

"The staircase gets annoyed when you do that," I said. "It does a marvelous job by itself."

The staircase whirred, as if it had been pleased by my comment. According to the old Harry, the Headmaster's staircase had a superiority complex. Sometimes it would stall for professors that the stairs did not particularly like, or for students that insulted its existence. In any case, the staircase had been suitably flattered, and it carried us up to the Headmaster's office at a swift (yet nauseating) pace.

"Thank you," Hermione said. "That was, uhm, quite wonderful… Turning."

The uppermost stairs wobbled slightly, as if they had just bowed to her. I blinked. Sometimes Hogwarts is a surreal place, even in the wizarding world.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Hermione said, after she had recovered from stair-based motion sickness. "How about we just...go back to the Common Room, and forget this ever happened?"

"Suppose they were the real defenses," I said. "If we could get through them, any wizard worth his salt can," I said. "Dumbledore needs to know. He'll probably give us house points." I rapped on the door, ignoring Hermione's grimace.

"Come in," Dumbledore said.

We awkwardly stepped into the office. Hermione gasped, then began to scan the room with the practiced eye of a perpetually curious student. Her eyes danced from the portraits of headmasters on the walls, then to the silver instruments around the office, which whirred and made odd noises around his desk. Fawkes the Phoenix perched next to Dumbledore's desk, and a saggy Sorting Hat sat on a dusty shelf. If the Headmaster was surprised to see us, he did not show it. Dumbledore tapped a miniature ceramic tea set on his desk, and it expanded into an entire tea spread. "It's good that you came to visit-and just in time for cream tea, too."

The headmaster poured out three servings of tea from his recently-resized teapot, and produced piping hot scones from behind his desk. He also set out two horrendously pink jars, which were filled with strawberry jam and heavy cream, respectively.

"Please, do sit," Dumbledore said. His eyes twinkled kindly, and a faint brush of Legilimency slid across my Occlumency shields. The headmaster continued pouring tea into Hermione's cup as if nothing of interest had just occurred.

My eyes widened. It seemed that the Headmaster's infamous twinkle had been the byproduct of Legilimency. Unsurprising, but interesting… "Beautiful phoenix," I said.

Fawkes trilled and fluttered over to my chair. Hermione gaped as the swan-like bird stared at me intently. It looked like it was sizing me up, its head peering at me from the side. "Do you need anything?" I said softly.

Fawkes settled down in my lap. After a moment of paralyzing terror, I began to stroke its head as if it were a cat. The bird's eyes closed as I slowly stroked its warm feathers. Hermione's eyes narrowed, as if she was filing away information to write down later.

Dumbledore's eyebrow twitched. "It's interesting that Fawkes takes a liking to you…"

"I have no idea why," I said. "But I'm honored anyways. I've heard that Phoenixes possess magical properties..." Fawkes made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a purr. I knew the bird loved to be buttered up. Fawkes and the Headmaster's stairs are peas in a pod.

"Indeed. Five points to Gryffindor," Dumbledore said. He spent the next minute cutting apart his scone with a surgically-precise cutting charm. The headmaster slathered one side with enough heavy cream to kill a hippopotamus, and added a dollop of raspberry jam to the other. When he bit into it, the jam or the cream somehow did not spill out the sides. Hermione and I could only watch the situation unfold in a state of awestruck horror. Eventually he finished his scone without a single dash of jam or cream on his face.

Then he sipped his tea, as if nothing of interest had occurred. "While your company is appreciated, I know that most students do not come to my office merely for the good company…"

I sighed. "We'd just like our house points for passing your test."

Dumbledore blinked, his teacup poised halfway to his lips. "What do you mean?"

"Your tests on the third floor corridor," Hermione said meekly. "We noticed that some things you said...didn't make sense."

"What do you mean?" Dumbledore said.

Hermione looked horrified. "If we broke the rules, then-"

"You wanted students to go to the third floor corridor," I said. "There are better ways to protect something within the school. Everyone knows there are more secret places in the school than books in the library-why not hide something in a place that couldn't be found in the first place? Then there's the door… It can be unlocked with a First Year spell. If you wanted to, you could stop the entire Ministry of Magic from getting through a vault."

Dumbledore's face had frozen into an unfamiliar expression. Surprise? I recklessly forged onwards.

"Finally, warning students to stay away from the corridor was a prime example of reverse psychology," I said. "You wanted students to attack your defenses. You also wanted certain people to know how to bypass its protections. Hagrid can't keep a secret to save his life-"

"Ron!" Hermione hissed. "You can't say that!"

"I can," I said stubbornly. "Without even intending to, Hagrid let slip not only what you were protecting, but also the first task."

Dumbledore looked intrigued. "And how, exactly, did he do that?"

"Hagrid was tasked to pick up a package from Gringotts, and Harry was there to see it. The vault was deep in the ground, so whatever he was picking up must have been important. Harry also saw that it was only a small package. Then when Harry asked about it, Hagrid mentioned Flamel. Flamel is mentioned on your chocolate frog card, so you two are obviously close friends. Flamel is mentioned in Les Grand Alchemysts de France as the creator of the Philosopher's stone. Therefore, the object you must be protecting is the Philosopher's Stone."

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled again, and this time his sting of Legilimency felt like a rake clawing across a brick wall. "Interesting theory."

"Once tested and proven, a theory is the closest one ever gets to the truth," I said.

Hermione's foot stomped on my toes. "Is Hagrid going to be in trouble?"

"I doubt it," I said. "Hagrid was supposed to let those secrets out. He even answered all my questions about the Cerberus in the first task."

"So that's how you did it," Hermione muttered. "What happened to being inspired by mythology?"

"Oh, I told Hagrid that I'd heard about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and he told me how to get past Fluffy," I said.

"Fluffy?" Dumbledore said.

"That's the dog's...er, Cerberus's name," I said. "Anyway, the next task was laughably easy. We learned about the Devil's Snare in First Year Herbology-coincidentally, the same class that Harry is part of. The third task was meant for a Quidditch player, specifically a seeker. Harry's a natural born seeker, and I don't think that's a coincidence. The fourth and sixth tasks were clearly designed for a brainiac. You wanted Hermione to be there at the end of the year, didn't you? It was a test for Harry. You want to see what he can do..."

My heart pounded in my chest. Why didn't I lay low? Why didn't I keep a low profile? Frustration, probably. My entire life had been thrown out of the window because of Dumbledore's cloak and dagger. I wanted answers, and I wanted them years ago. The Headmaster had died as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. His answers could, perhaps, be the key.

"And the troll?" Dumbledore said. "Surely that wasn't a task a First Year could complete."

"I think another wizard was supposed to complete that task first," I said. "Then the First years were supposed to follow. By the time they arrived at the fifth task, the troll would be defeated, and-"

The Headmaster's eyes twinkled yet again, and it felt like a wrecking ball slamming against my mental fortifications. I gasped. "Stop," I said. "Whatever you're doing, stop it." Abruptly, the psychic attack halted. Spots spun in my vision. The Headmaster had come dangerously close to smashing through my mental fortifications. A thrill of horror tingled down my spine-I had forgotten exactly how dangerous Dumbledore could be.

"Why haven't you fired Professor Quirrell yet?" I said, my eyes firmly shut. "Why did you set up an obstacle course specifically designed for First Years? What's your game?"

"Ron," Hermione hissed. "What is going on?"

"Yes, I'd like to know that too," I said. "What is going on, Dumbledore?"

"I'm afraid teatime is over," Dumbledore said, settling his teacup to gently clink against the saucer. "You are dismissed."

I gently pushed Fawkes out of my arms, but he didn't seem willing to go back to its perch. My eyes were still firmly shut. Hermione stood up, and I blindly grabbed onto her for support. Fawkes squawked and began climbing my robes. I chanced letting my eyes crack open, and I dizzily stepped out of the office and onto the stairs.

"What the heck was that?" Hermione said. "Also, I think you stole the Headmaster's bird."

Fawkes trilled in annoyance, and my migraine worsened. My vision blurred, and colored lines were sketching along my field of view. "Fawkes doesn't have a master," I gasped. "Also, I think I might throw up."

I threw up.

"Aren't you going to clean it up?" Hermione said. I had made a nasty mess in Dumbledore's stairwell, and it gave off a putrid stench.

"Nope." Fawkes sang some fast notes, sounding like a soprano that had been kicked in the ovaries. Apparently, the dratted bird found my plight funny. "It's his fault, anyhow."

"What do you mean?" Hermione said.

"Migraines are induced by mental attack," I said, pausing to grip Hermione's arm once more.

"You aren't making any sense," Hermione snapped. "I'm taking you to the hospital wing."

"We need to go to the seventh floor, the Hall of Hexes," I said. "Fawkes, can you get us there with your Phoenix fire… please?"

"Don't be stupid," Hermione said. "Apparition doesn't work on the school grounds-it clearly says so in-"

"Hogwarts, A History," I said. "See, Fawkes? She says it's impossible."

Fawkes flapped its enormous wings, pushing off my shoulder to hover in the air, letting its tail feathers hang in front of us like a scarf.

"Grab on," I said. I had already grabbed a fistful of gold-red feathers.

Hermione reluctantly let her hand gently touch one of the phoenix's tail feathers, and a nimbus of flame engulfed us both.

The phoenix fire transported us up to the Hall of Hexes, on the seventh floor. Hermione dizzily leaned onto the wall for support.

"Thanks, Fawkes," I said.

The bird fluttered away, its golden-red feathers smacking me in the face as it went. I dragged an increasingly confused Hermione into the Room of Requirement.

"Where are we?" Hermione said.

"The Room of Requirement," I muttered. "It gives you what you need."

"Which is why this place looks like a evil villain's lair," Hermione said.

The best part of the room was a 'Milder Migraine' potion, displayed with prominence on a tiny coffee table. I downed the ice-cold potion in two quick gulps, and my migraine retreated to a throbbing headache. Hermione did have a point though. On closer inspection, the Room did look rather like a villain's lair Enchanted globes of glaringly bright light covered the ceiling, and stamped copper pillars held up the bulk of the interior floor space. In the centre stood a massive lab. It mimicked the cluttered layout of a prototyping workshop, complete with massive contraptions; racks of tools hung patiently for an enterprising engineer to pick up. Sadly, the Room of Requirement had a difficult time recreating laser cutters, milling machines, and 3D printers. Absently, I resolved to fix that issue in the near future.

"It's not a lair, it's a workshop," I said.

"...Right." Hermione crossed her arms, then rubbed her eyes. "I need answers, Ron."

"What do you mean?"

Hermione gave me a withering glare, then held up her hand. "Question one: what happened back there in the Headmaster's office, Ron?"

"We talked to Dumbledore," I said. My eyeballs felt like someone was stabbing at it with a pickaxe.

"Right, but what happened?"

"My suspicions were confirmed," I said. "All of my worst fears…"

Hermione visibly ground her teeth in frustration. "What do you mean?!"

"It means I was lying to you. Those were the fortifications protecting the Philosopher's Stone. Congratulations for passing Dumbledore's tests, Hermione…"

"Answer my question-what happened in that office?" Hermione snapped.

"The start of a massive game," I said, through steepled fingers. "Think of it like chess. There's a fight coming, Hermione. These are merely the opening moves."

"What fight?"

I sighed, then swiped at a work table. It shimmered and fell apart like water, morphing into a passable metal statue of Voldemort, poised over the form of a sleeping child. Two lumps lay at the dark wizards feet-Lily Potter had died with her hand reaching through the bars of the crib, a hair's breadth away from the baby's fingertips. James Potter had fallen a metre away from the crib, facedown on the floor.

"Here we are in Godric's Hallow, in the year 1981. It's Halloween, and the Dark Wizard known as Lord Voldemort is poised to kill Harry Potter-but something happens."

"He's defeated," Hermione says.

"No…" I said. "Watch and see…"

A green flash from the statue's wand hits the metal infant Harry, but it bounces back at Voldemort. The Dark Wizard's statue crumbles to pieces.

"Gone," I cried. "Gone, but not forgotten."

A snake slithers out of Voldemort's fallen statue, and the baby begins to cry. Slowly, the statues within the scene melt away into the ground once more, and sweat beads on my forehead. These transfigurations were beyond N.E.W.T. level. Making a comprehensive story from transfiguration was even harder than I had anticipated.

"The snake escaped," I said. "The Dark One was weakened, but not defeated."

The scene turned into that of a forest, with the same snake slithering through foliage. "In the forests of Albania, the vanquished wizard clung to life, his soul held together with unfathomably dark magicks. Stuck in his miserable state, he is limited in power and scope."

Hermione's eyes widened in terror. Her wand was clutched in her hand.

"The snake waits patiently… Until a particularly gullible mind becomes available. The parasite strikes."

The statue Quirrell had been bitten by a snake, and the wizard struggled futilely for control. The statue's mouth opens in a silent scream.

"Emboldened by the power of its new host, the dark wizard plans to return back to the only home he has ever known-Hogwart's School of Wizardry."

"No…"

The statue rises to its feet, wrapping a turban around its head. "The Dark Lord is back, and now roams freely within the halls of Hogwarts."

"Quirrell!" Hermione cried.

"Yes," I said. "Now do you see?"

"It's a worrying theory," Hermione admitted. "But what does this have to do with Dumbledore?"

I leaned forward, ignoring my pounding head. "He knows at least some of this-surely a wizard such as him would know that Quirrell stinks of the Dark. That's why he wants the Dark Lord here. At least at Hogwarts, Dumbledore can monitor the Dark Lord closely. Most importantly, he can test the child of prophecy." The scene changed to the first-year Harry, his wand pointed at Quirrel. Behind him, a representation of the Mirror of Erised dominated.

"We were there," Hermione gasped. "Just an hour ago."

"Exactly," I said. "My Inner Eye is abnormally clear-sometime this year, Harry Potter will find himself facing the Dark Wizard himself."

I waved my wand one final time, and the scene morphed back into workbenches and tools. Then I sat down on an armchair, conjuring a bandanna to place over my eyes.

"What does this mean?" Hermione said. "And how do you know all of this?"

I pulled down my blindfold just a smidge, to stare at the girl with one piercing eye. "I'm a Seer," I said simply. "I see the future. I'm a talented one too-I see the future in detail, though the scope is somewhat limited. It's how I can perform spells outside of my age bracket-I see spells in the future before they are taught to me, and then I'm able to use them."

I could see Hermione's mind race as she thought it through. "That… Does explain your…"

"Prodigal talents?" I said. "Don't worry, you're still a genius." I slipped the blindfold back over my eyes.

"Why show me all of this?" Hermione said. "What's your game, Ron?"

"I can't do this alone," I said frankly. "My mind can only interpret so many futures all at once. Think of a game of chess. One person makes a move, then someone reacts to that move, et cetera. Fairly linear, and it's set in a closed system. Yet after only two moves from each player, there are 72,084 possible positions. After four moves from each player, there are over 288 billion possible positions. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"Seeing the future is hard?" Hermione ventures.

"Exactly. And changing it is even harder. Changing one variable will make the entire system react in a crazy way. That's why what I can do to change the future is limited in scope."

Hermione frowned. "In what way?"

"I can't just walk up to Harry and say 'Golly, it looks like there's a prophecy and you're part of it! Have fun killing that Dark Wizard! Also, he's your Defense against the Dark Arts Teacher!' It would screw up everything. But if we prepared him for it, he could just maybe survive a run-in with Voldemort."

"Ah."

"You're taking this rather well," I said. "All things considered."

"I'm probably just in shock."

"Oh, ok."

For a moment there was silence within the Room of Requirement while I allowed Hermione to digest what I'd just said. In the meantime, I congratulated myself for that masterstroke. By telling Hermione that I was a Seer, I had allayed her suspicions for the time being. In a way, I wasn't even lying. I had seen the future, albeit in a linear manner. I could see the young witch mull the concept over in her mind-the way she played with her hair was the greatest tell. Finally, I could see that she had made a decision.

"What do I need to do?" Hermione said.

"Homework," I said.

"What?!" Hermione said incredulously. "What do you mean, homework?!"

"Imagine this was a class, Hermione. Except this class always applies to real wizarding life-I think I'll call it 'Saving the World: Explorations in Hopefully Not Dying to Psychopaths 101,'" I said, pleased.

"That's the worst title for a class I've ever heard," Hermione snapped. "Just tell me what I need to do."

"I don't need a Seer to know that you are an amazing academic," I began.

Hermione beamed.

"-So your first task is to research two fairly simple terms. The first is Occlumency, and the second is Legilimency. The second task is not to disclose what we've discussed here, obviously. The third task… Is the most important of all."

"What is it?"

"You must not look at Professor Snape, Professor Quirrell, or Headmaster Dumbledore directly in the eyes. The threads of time after that simple action all lead to one conclusion," I said.

"Which is?" Hermione said.

"Disaster."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are flying off the rails now! Goodbye relative canon-compliance, it was fun.


	11. Ron's Notes (Excerpt V): Paradigm Shifts

**Ron's Notes (Excerpt VI): Paradigm Shifts**

_Gaining access to the Time Room within the Department of Mysteries did not solve my problems. Instead, it only led to frustration. I thought that Theodore Nott's 'new' time turner suggested research and development ongoing within the Time Room. Instead, I was greeted with a mountain of relatively mundane treatises on the dangers of time travel. Most of those papers were useless to me, or confirmed what I already suspected about Time Turners… That they are essentially unreliable to use safely past the hour threshold._

_Some experiments had such grotesque results that sections of the files had simply been redacted with black bars. Time-reversal spells often ended with disastrous consequences. Most of the time experiments were discontinued in 1899, after Eloise Mintumble used a modified time turner to travel back in time to the year 1402. She stayed within that time for five days, and had aged five hundred years once summoned back to her own time. Poor Eloise succumbed to old age in St. Mungo's, but that was not all. At least twenty-five people vanished into thin air after her travels in the past, rendering them un-born. The Tuesday following the ordeal lasted two and a half full days, and the next Thursday lasted only four hours. Due to the results of this catastrophic test, strict limits were placed on time-travel research and experimentation._

_This is relatively common knowledge nowadays, since most of these papers have since been declassified. However, I found crucial information within the few classified files remaining. An Unspeakable within that period noted that the critical failure of the test was probably due to their reliance on temporal anchors. Someone properly going into the past would have to sever all connection with their past, allowing their time stream to flow forward without any influence from individuals in the future. This remained theoretical-one long-dead Unspeakable from Eloise's time dubbed the concept 'mass temporal genocide.'_

_Furthermore, it seemed that time-travelers are limited by lifespan. A classified test revealed that a sixty-two year old Unspeakable traveled twenty years back in time and found himself in a forty-two year old body. When he traveled back to his own time (within a seven minute period) he found that he had aged back to sixty-two. Time Turners are generally exempt from these effects, due to their relatively limited method of time travel._

_Despite these dangers, I knew that the danger had to be overcome-or even embraced. I organized one last-ditch effort to persuade Harry to see reason, pleading for him to fund one final time travel experiment… Off the books, of course. He refused._

" _I miss Hermione as much as you do," he said. "But I don't think this is healthy. You can't cheat death, Ron."_

_He then went on a mamby-pamby rant about some things being outside a wizard's rightful domain. I called him a coward. How dare he? How could he turn his back on one of his oldest friends? Hermione had died before her time, and he was perfectly content to let her stay that way! We said regrettable, hurtful things to each other. When the dust settled, I was no longer an Unspeakable, and Harry and I were no longer on speaking terms. It only strengthened my resolve. That coward would not stop me. This timeline was a disease, and I wanted to stop it from poisoning my life further. Harry may have had a happy ending, but I deserve mine. I will have my life back-with, or without his support._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story updates Thursdays. If you have any comments about the work or want to simply point out inconsistencies, feel free to post comments! This is my first fanfic, so please be gentle :)


End file.
